When an incident or accident of a vehicle occurs, it can sometimes be difficult to determine who is responsible for the damage. This is especially true in situations where for instance a passenger car has been damaged when parked, which is a common occurrence when it comes to, e.g., scratches or minor dents. Furthermore, in some countries it happens that vulnerable road users—VRU—such as pedestrians fake an accident in order to claim compensation. Since it can be very difficult to determine who is responsible for the damage in these type of situations it is common that some drivers choose not to report the accident and rather settle the dispute on site and/or pay for the repair themselves. Nonetheless, the troublesome procedure and potential cost that follows upon an incident/accident cause many drivers to worry about the hassle.
In order to prove who is responsible for an incident/accident, many drivers install a so called dashcam in their vehicle which records the front view of the vehicle. If an incident/accident occurs, the video data is used to objectively view the scenario and determine who is responsible for the incident/accident. However, a dashcam is only able to record a front view of the vehicle which is insufficient when it comes to detecting incidents on the sides or the rear of the vehicle. In addition, a dashcam might be inconvenient to install and can occlude the rearview mirror.
Furthermore, a lot of memory to store all video data of the dashcam will be needed if recording everything when the vehicle is moving. Still further, it may be difficult to afterwards find the situation where a possible incident/accident occurred since there will be a lot of stored video data from the dashcam.
Thus, there seems to be room for improvement for detecting possible incidents, accidents and/or scams.
According to its abstract, U.S. Pat. No. 6,246,933 B1 discloses systems for sensing, storing and updating operation parameters, visual conditions and audible conditions for an automotive vehicle which include a plurality of sensors for registering vehicular operation parameters, including at least one vehicle-mounted digital video/audio camera.
EP 1 280 681 B1 discloses a device mounted to an automobile for automatically recording circumstances around the automobile as images with sounds, and also to a device for recording an image of driving circumstances around an automobile, wherein cameras for obtaining images are mounted to the automobile.
According to its abstract, U.S. Pat. No. 5,815,093 A discloses a vehicle accident recording system which employs a digital camera connected to a controller, a nonvolatile memory, and an accident-sensing interrupter. The controller accesses images from the digital camera periodically and stores the images in a limited space of n sectors.